Spielberg's rule

By TAD BARTIMUS

If you believe in a God you have to consider that Steven Spielberg was put on this earth to be the collective witness. How else to explain the filmmaker's incalculable impact on the worldwide human psyche?

Like millions of Americans, I went to see "Saving Private Ryan" because I felt I HAD to. The movie was epic, message, Spielberg. That's become synonymous with duty. Seeing Spielberg is like eating spinach, you may not like it very much but it makes you stronger.

Those sweet young men with innocent faces and all the promise of youth do not have to go to war like my father did, like my friends did.

Sure, the hype and the buzz contributed to getting me into a seat. But those were peripheral nudges. The real reason I went is because the man has conditioned me with his track record. When I go to a Spielberg movie I know I'll have the same experience I get in church: emotional, educational, uplifting.

I see photographs of Spielberg in magazines and wonder: How could this ordinary-looking Boomer with a pretty wife, nice parents and a passel of kids be so brilliant at making movies that influence millions? There he is, in blue jeans and a windbreaker, standing on a beach directing 1,000 extras in a scene that for him is all in a day's work while the rest of us have trouble navigating five lanes of traffic, pitching a new client or deciding whether to have Thai or Italian for dinner. How does he know how to make that scene so real, so vivid, that men who landed on Omaha Beach before he was born swear it's exactly the experience they had? Yes, he researches, works hard, hires talented people. But how does he know?

Mozart knew, Shakespeare knew, Michelangelo knew. But compared to Spielberg their audiences were miniscule. He is a populist messenger for the masses at the millennium. HE IS THE ONE! But why? Could it be because, bottom line, he's serving up the Golden Rule? ET, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad and even Jurassic Park tell us to do unto others as we would have done to us. Otherwise, leave well enough alone, even if it's a big white shark with ugly teeth.

Clearly, Spielberg wants to create art. But it's the message we take home with us. His endings don't trail off into yadda yadda; he constructs films that make us feel, make us think, make us want to care about something bigger than our car or our watch. He shows us on the biggest screen, with the loudest sound, that racism is FUBAR, genocide is FUBAR, anti-Semitism is FUBAR, violence against one another in any form is FUBAR.

I sat in a theater with 500 people - all ages, colors, religions - for nearly three hours and shared Spielberg's vision of war with them. I watched as around me veterans cried, white -haired ladies murmured "oh no!" and type-A's sat immobile. I absentmindedly rubbed my own skin raw in anxiety. I grasped the meaning of my father's silence about his World War II experience; my husband swore that James Francis Ryan as an old man looked exactly like his father, a veteran of Okinawa. Sure, Spielberg manipulated all of us: he got us invested in Capt. Miller and his men. In every one of his films he reveals the universal humanity of his characters, seduces us into bonding with them, then wrenches them away from us. But so does all violence and cruelty, one human being against another. That's his point, and we got it.

When the movie was over the audience silently filed out. Among the last to leave were a dozen teenage boys I'd noticed as they came in, rambunctious and laughing, full of life.

After three hours of Spielberg's war they were solemn. Those sweet young men with innocent faces and all the promise of youth do not have to go to war like my father did, like my friends did. Maybe, just maybe, with Spielberg's war in their heads, their generation will work to make sure their sons and daughters don't, either. Maybe that's why Spielberg is here.

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